by Jon Lackman | 10 May 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
From the L.A. Times: It’s the “Andromeda Chained to the Rock, credited for more than 150 years to the Flemish master Anthony Van Dyck. The Ahmanson Foundation acquired it in 1985 as a 20th birthday present to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which put it up right away. ‘It sends chills up and down my spine,’ said Scott Schaefer, then LACMA’s curator of European paintings, welcoming the work to the collection. But these days, Andromeda is all but invisible. Although it probably cost about $1 million, it hasn’t been hung in a public area for several years, and the museum has never announced a reason. The answer is there, however, for those who dig into LACMA’s online collection database: In July 1998, the museum decided it wasn’t a Van Dyck after all. ‘It’s a casualty of art history,’ says J. Patrice Marandel, who took over as LACMA’s curator of European paintings in 1993. ‘We’re not hiding it. We’re not ashamed of it. Perhaps we’re sorry, but I wouldn’t even go that far.’”
